Software development and daily life in Seattle

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my wireless is dying…

I’ve still got an original Apple Airport Graphite in the basement, serving up 802.11b goodness for house. Only it’s starting to not serve up so much goodness. I’ve carefully checked against the neighbor’s wifi – and we’re on different channels, but the WIFI is dropping out around the house periodically, only to come back on in a few minutes.

At first I thought it was the latest upgrade to Leopard (10.5.3), but I’m quite sure it’s not now – as other OS’s (Win XP and my 10.4 desktop) are seeing the same issues. I did the usual routine of power-cycling the unit to see if that would help – nope, to no avail.

I even tried to hook up to it with Apple’s airport utility but the unit is so old that the current utilities won’t even recognize it. I didn’t realize that the device was released in 1999 until I looked it up. The particular device has been in operation for 9 1/2 years now. I had it before coming to Seattle – bought it with an original tangerine iBook. (I still have that iBook – still works too). 10 years for a wireless base station – not too shabby.

I think this frustrating intermittent lack of connectivity is a sign. That and I’ve been wanting 802.11n connectivity for a while anyway. I’m leaning towards investing in a Time Capsule – which combines a backup disk that works with Leopard’s time machine as well as the full airport connectivity setup. The vast majority of the network connections in the house are all wireless – we need something that’s stable if I’m going to avoid running a huge amount of random Cat5E cabling through the house. And on this house, I really really want to avoid doing that. We have plaster and lathe walls – incredible pain in the butt the patch once you’ve put a hole in it…

It won’t be this weekend – I’m doing errands and so forth before I head back down to San Francisco for the Velocity conference early part of next week. Probably some time after I get back.